Joshua Davis (born June 13, 1971) is an American

designer A designer is a person who plans the form or structure of something before it is made, by preparing drawings or plans. In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, products, processes, laws, games, graphics, services, or exper ...

, technologist, author, and visual artist in new media. He is best known as the creator of praystation.com, winner of the

Prix Ars Electronica The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the best known and longest running yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music. It has been awarded since 1987 by Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria ...

2001 Golden Nica for "Net Vision / Net Excellence”. He was an early adopter of open-source software, offering the source code of the praystation.com composition and animation developments to the public. Davis had a role in designing the visualization of IBM's Watson, the intelligent computer program capable of answering questions, for the quiz show

Jeopardy ''Jeopardy!'' is an American television game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead g ...

. His work has been inducted into the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, National Design Triennial 2006 “Design Life Now”, and he has spoken at the TED and 99U conferences about his career in algorithmic image making and open-source software.

Career

Since 1995, Joshua Davis has made a career as an image maker using programming. He writes his own code to produce interactions with users and generate visual compositions according to rule-based, randomized processes. Davis was an early web designer. He was introduced to the internet by a design student friend at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he studied illustration and art history. After a year of working on illustration by day and programming at night, Davis ran out of cash and was offered a job writing HTML for Pratt's web site. He dropped out of Pratt in his junior year to work in the new field of design technology.

Selected works

Praystation

His website, Praystation.com, which he would use to exhibit new design work and experiments, was one of the first to offer

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

Flash files. The second year of Praystation.com was compiled into a

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

called ''PrayStation Hardrive'', which included source files, photos and miscellaneous items that Joshua Davis worked on during that time, distributed in limited quantities by IdN magazine. The disc included a 32-page booklet and was packaged in a plastic casing modeled after the

PlayStation 2 The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October, in Europe on 24 Novembe ...

Dreamless

Dreamless.org was the site of a popular Internet forum, hosted by Joshua Davis from 1999 to 2001. Its minimal design, understated

Web presence A web presence is a location on the World Wide Web where a person, business, or some other entity is represented (see also web property and point of presence). Examples of a web presence for a person could be a personal website, a blog, a profile ...

and hidden registration page all added to its intrigue, and for a while it was a gathering place for many graphic and web designers and programmers. "

Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editin ...

Battles" were a popular activity among forum members, leading into the

internet phenomenon Internet phenomena are social and cultural phenomena specific to the Internet, such as Internet memes, which include popular catchphrases, images, viral videos, and jokes. When such fads and sensations occur online, they tend to grow rapidly ...

now referred to as Photoshop tennis. The community of Dreamless traveled past the boundaries of the Internet — impromptu local meetings ("riots", as Davis called them) were arranged for Dreamless users to meet face-to-face and exchange ideas.

Threadless Threadless (stylized as threadless) is an online community of artists and an e-commerce website based in Chicago, Illinois, founded in 2000 by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart. Threadless designs are created by and chosen by an online community. E ...

founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart met while active in the Dreamless community, and started Threadless after Jake won a T-shirt design competition run by Dreamless. One notorious forum on Dreamless was "08 - Meaningless and Shallow", a topical free-for-all which led to numerous

flame war Flaming, also known as roasting, is the act of posting insults, often including profanity or other offensive language, on the internet. Flaming is distinct from trolling, which is the act of someone causing discord online or in person. Flaming eme ...

s, post floods and user-led

XSS Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of security vulnerability that can be found in some web applications. XSS attacks enable attackers to inject client-side scripts into web pages viewed by other users. A cross-site scripting vulnerability may be ...

vandalism Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The t ...

. After several "meltdowns" and member disputes, Davis closed Dreamless in July 2001. The link was reused to host Davis's

Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a 2011 sandbox game developed and published by the Swedish video game developer Mojang Studios. Originally created by Markus Persson, Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java (programming language), Java programming language, the ...

server. While private at the time of its creation, it is now open to everyone. The server was used mainly by the

Deadmau5 Joel Thomas Zimmerman (born January 5, 1981), known professionally as deadmau5 (pronounced "dead-mouse"), is a Canadian electronic music producer and disc jockey, DJ. His musical style mostly includes progressive house and electro house music, ...

mau5ville Minecraft community. As of July 2021 the minecraft server is no longer running.

Books

* *

Multimedia

Websites

Once Upon A Forest

PrayStation.com
- Year 2, version 4 archive
Hype Framework
- A collaborative project with Branden Hall

Awards and accolades

Joshua Davis was the winner of the 2001

Golden Nica in the category “Net Excellence” and has exhibited his works at the

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

(London), the

Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in t ...

(Austria), the

Design Museum The Design Museum in Kensington, London, England, exhibits product, industrial, graphic, fashion, and architectural design. In 2018, the museum won the European Museum of the Year Award. The museum operates as a registered charity, and all fund ...

(London), le

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

(France), the

Institute of Contemporary Arts The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an modernism, artistic and cultural centre on The Mall (London), The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps a ...

(London), PS.1 MoMA (New York), among others. In December 2006, his work was included in the Smithsonian’s

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is a design museum at the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in Manhattan, New York City, along the Upper East Side's Museum Mile. It is one of 19 Smithsonian Institution museums and one of three Smithsonian facil ...

’s "National Design Triennial: Design Life Now" exhibit.